The divergence at the heart of
Pavane is compelling, if a bit Anglocentric. In 1588, Queen Elizabeth I is assassinated, and the Spanish Armada goes onto defeat the British fleet. King Philip of Spain senses an opportunity to seize greater power, and swiftly conquers all of northern Europe. The power of the papacy is restored, the Reformation is crushed, and Europe slides back into the Middle Ages. And then, four centuries later, the story begins.
The book takes its name from a courtly medieval dance performed in six parts plus a coda. Similarly,
Pavane is divided into six "measures", the loosely connected novellas that move the story along, as well as a closing coda that throws everything that came before it into serious question. Keith Roberts originally wrote five of these stories for
Science Fantasy, and then collected them in 1968, along with a sixth story and the coda, to create the book's current incarnation.
The world of
Pavane is equal parts rich detail and maddening ambiguity. The dominant vehicles of England in 1968 are steam-powered traction engines, which haul goods from place to place in lieu of railroads and must evade the marauding thieves known as
routiers. Messages are transmitted over great distances using semaphore towers, which can relay coded signals over hundreds of miles in a matter of hours. The Inquisition is still in full swing, and now requires artistically inclined monks to serve as court reporters.
But for all those clear pieces of information, there's at least as much that goes only partially explained. Multiple references are made to faeries and old ones and the remarkable abilities such beings have. Are they truly magical, or does
Clarke's third law come into play? On multiple occasions, characters encounter bits of seemingly advanced technology, but Roberts refuses to describe them clearly, perhaps on the grounds that none of the characters in
Pavane would understand them anyway. The coda in particular seems to push any chance of fully understanding the book out of reach, but that can be part of the fun.
As is to be expected of a story collection,
Pavane is somewhat uneven. The opening entry, "The Lady Margaret", is probably the most straightforward, at least in part because it has to give the reader enough exposition to understand what the hell is going on. "The Signaller" starts out in a similar vein, as it traces its protagonist's journey from lowly commoner to signal operator, but it concludes on a mysterious note that sets the tone for the subsequent stories.
I really felt like she wasted my time and she should be ashamed of herself when I finished her 500-page dross about snakes and poor people in Mississippi to essentially tell you absolutely nothing worth reading.
